My mission as a teacher is to enable my students to learn joyfully, read carefully, think clearly, and write well.

Write Well

Writing quality is something that college professors often complain a lot about and do very little to improve. All of us can become better writers and even very famous authors use professional editors to improve the quality of their work. Good writing can accomplish so much more. And, there are some ways that we can both make the writing process easier and more powerful.

Seven Steps to Powerful Paper Writing I have developed this inductive method of paper writing as an antidote to the deductive method many of us learned in school. While most of us learned to start with a thesis, develop three main supporting arguments, and marshal the evidence to the support those contentions, this method inverts that process entirely. Over the years, the feedback I have received about this method from my students has been exciting. They have told me that it improved the quality of their writing throughout their classes and made the writing process far less painful.

A Writing Checklist This three page checklist tries to help the student attend to the wide range of concerns facing a writer. From the mechanical and organizational to the artistic and social, we have a lot to consider as we attempt to communicate the best of our ideas in the most compelling way.